Allods Team Arcade appears to be hitting the nail on the head with their game so far. It has everything you want in a platform-shooter, plus it has some non-linear exploration elements that complement the story and upgrade system while pulling on your nostalgic platform heartstrings. It is a good start.
We were privy to a demo of Blast Brigade, a game developed by Allods Team Arcade, that is a platform arcade shooter experience with a pinch of LucasArts personality to make it fun and not too serious. You’ll appreciate the latter, as the game can be difficult at times (LucasArts). Let’s get right into this preview!
Typical
The story for Blast Brigade is nothing too special. It’s a mixture of Expendables and James Bond that revolves around a group of mercenaries that crash land on an island, where they explore and discover some strange happenings and evil doings. As they move further into the island, they find well-armed, yet witty guards, robots, and creatures that want to impede their progress. The entire island is a sinister playground of evil, which gives our heroes a job to do.
The story is what you would expect from a shooter of this type. It’s simple, funny at times, and the characters harken back to an 80s age where platform-shooters were just a pick-up-and-go deal. This is like a playful version Rush-n-Attack or Bionic Commando. Every part of the story feels important and is fun to uncover, but at the same time doesn’t overpower the gameplay design. You won’t be emotionally invested in this, but you will be mildly amused.
In short, the story isn’t going to break any new ground, but honestly, it doesn’t feel like it is trying to do that at all.
New Ground
The gameplay, while certainly a platform-shooter type, is more non-linear than I expected. First and foremost, the maps in this game are huge! You can spend a good chunk of time exploring in this game and the design encourages just that type of gameplay. Going back to Bionic Commando, which also encouraged one to go back and forth between areas to revisit items of interest, Blast Brigade doesn’t waste an ounce of the screen with discouraging exploration. The game gives you a view of unreachable areas, silently whispers in a Van Wilder voice, “Write this down”, and then pushes you forward in a presumed linear fashion. Much like cake, linear is a lie. Revisiting these areas and uncovering new parts and items is a good part of the gameplay and makes this platform-shooter more than just typical.
As you progress in the game, you will gain the opportunity to upgrade items, build complexes, gather up coins, and other goodies from the same gameplay structure tree. By seeing the areas described above, you will put 2+2 together and equal out to explore pathways further by gaining and finding more items. Those pathways will lead you to things like blueprints for new buildings or SSH upgrades. Both will equal out to better items you can purchase if you have the right number of coins from killing enemies. The game pushes you in this well-conceived structure of gameplay logic, where you get more by discovering more and killing more enemies. It’s like a sway in a dance, where you feel like what you are doing cannot be wrong. In the end, it’s a bigger world thanks to this design than it should be in a platform-shooter, which makes it an addictive, explorative, fun game that you honestly want to see through. I was sad when the demo ended. I was just getting into the groove of the above.
The only iffy part of this demo experience, if I was going to be critical, is how repetitive the enemies can be within it. There isn’t a large variety of baddies, and they reset when you leave an area, but this is a demo, so I must give it the benefit of the doubt. That’s truly my only complaint, and since it’s a demo I can’t really confirm if that will be the case in the final product. As platform-shooters go, this repetitiveness is typical, and since I really do believe they’re tugging on the nostalgic heartstrings of gamers, then this might be okay. Was this really a complaint?
Anyway…
Looking Good
The game looks and feels like a Phineas and Ferb special, where the models in the game are simple and cartoon-like figures that are as whacky as they are detailed. The environments, enemies, and general animation is visually playful, as is the dialogue spouted from everyone. The game just doesn’t take itself seriously at all. It just wants to have fun and entertain you with humor as it pushes you along the huge world built for your exploration.
See you in the fall
Allods Team Arcade appears to be hitting the nail on the head with their game so far. It has everything you want in a platform-shooter, plus it has some non-linear exploration elements that complement the story and upgrade system while pulling on your nostalgic platform heartstrings. It is a good start.
We’ll be back later in the season with a review of the finished product.
